April portfolio update: small step back, but still on track

Me? I had a pretty decent month. My third son was born, happy and healthy (and he and his brothers have even had the decency to let my wife and I get some sleep every now and then), the Cavs swept the Pacers in the first round of the Eastern Conference playoffs (let’s goooooo!!!) and I made $21.44 in passive income thanks to dividend payments from 34 different companies.

Now, anyone with half a brain can figure out just over $20 from more than 30 companies equates to some pretty minuscule payments – one as low as $0.06 – but a dividend is a dividend. Dividend-growth investing is a journey and, well, all journeys have to start somewhere. Mine began with a $100 investment into my Robinhood account last summer. Without a plan, or any real clue as to what I was doing, I played around with the platform’s commission-free trading for the first couple months until I realized I wanted to invest in stocks that paid dividends. Once I figured that much out, I received my first dividend shortly after – a $0.50 payment from Wal-mart on Jan. 3.

Now, thanks to April’s haul, I’m up to $63.45.

I didn’t quite reach my goal of increasing my dividend payments month after month, falling short of the $22.90 I received in March by $1.46, but I did make some progress … I just need to plan my purchases a little better.

It’s hard to see the progress I’ve made when you compare April to March – partially because there was no progress from a dividend standpoint – but a glance at things from a quarterly perspective paints a much prettier picture. All of the companies I invest in pay quarterly dividends, meaning the ones the paid me in April also paid me in January … at least some of them (took me a bit to familiarize myself with ex-dividend dates). Like I said before, I didn’t have a plan until late last year. Now I do … and it shows. I received $8.25 in dividend payments from a combined 12 different companies in January. In April, I earned the $21.44 from 34 companies. In other words, I was paid nearly 160% more in dividends by 22 more companies in April than in January.

Three of the companies I got dividends from (in January and April) raised their payouts, too. WMT increased its payout from $0.50 a share to $0.51, KMB upped its dividend from $0.92 a share to $0.97 and DPS increased its dividend from $0.53 to $0.58.

Not too shabby.

Overall, I’m a bit bummed I didn’t surpass the March total, but more than happy with what I got … and the steps I took to get it.

I’ll wrap this post up with a list of all the dividends I received in April. Companies are listed first, with number of shares in parenthesis. I earned the most from Cisco and the least from Xerox.